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I left this morning for Texas. I hate traveling because I can never sleep and things get rushed and I get burned out easy.

I got into Texas in a couple hours with trying to sleep on the plane. I got maybe a hour but the kids behind me would not shut up. I swear, Sun Countrys service rocks but some of the stupid first time family flying public annoys the shit out of me.

If you see someone grab a gray bin to put stuff in it, DON’T go and put your own stuff in it if someone else is using it.  Damn Newbee flying public…

Made it into Dallas and got the rental car which is kind of a POS. I hit the breaks and the rotors are warped big time and shakes like crazy. The joys of traveling. Here is a pretty sweet Dallas Skyline photo I took on the fly.

Made it down to Houston this afternoon.

And I really can tell I’m not in Liberal-Sota now. While waiting for the room to be made, I’m working down in the hotel lobby and I went to get a beer to relax and this is the sign on the wall.

Ok, at least I can say that I did not get suckered into the major hype since I did not leave to chase until the first watch went up this morning.

I chased the area of Wisconsin just north of Eau Claire and it sucked!

I saw some decent storms… in between the hill’s and tree’s. I made it to Colfax when I saw this just drop out of the sky for about 90 seconds. By the time I made it to the north side of the town to a clearing, it was gone.

The radar reported that some of the storms were moving at 60 miles per hour. Funk That!!!

Anyway, Here is the images of what I saw that was not reported since I could not see through the stupid trees and hills to confirm anything.

*** Update *** Notice the direction of the flags in two of the photos. Their blowing towards “The Fun Thing” at the time I saw this, there was a tornado warning, hmmmmm. Oh well, I still did not call it in since I could not confirm it. Based on the Radar Data, screw it, its a very shitty funnel that did not last long as it was ripped apart by the storm motion.

I swear I have had a half dozen phone calls asking “you going chasing…” NO NO and NO. The setup looks like a shitty July capped out setup.

So, I chased laundry and finishing up a speech I have to give on Saturday in Texas. Seriously, I looked at the setup today and the posts from other chasers who some sounded like they were in tears because they could not chase and said to myself, get a life people. It’s only a storm.

There will be many more and with a lot better setups then what was today’s setup.
I called Scott Weberpal and talked to him about today’s setup and he told me the same thing.

Got better things to do then to drive 500 miles away and watch the sky. Is this the next step in storm chasing? Yes, it’s called getting a life people. Yes I will chase but I won’t chase more then a 3/4 of a tank of gas from home. It’s just not worth it since I’ve seen it all.

Maybe if a great setup comes along like the May 2004 setup but honestly, there has not been a good setup to really get me excited over chasing long distance for tornadoes since April of 2005. Sorry if you were one of those yahoos I insulted who chase after all these shitty setups but, Save Fuel, Learn To Forecast!!!

Today is the first day of hurricane season and Tropical Storm Barry just formed this afternoon.

This is pretty crazy and it looks like it will hit Florida this weekend as a pretty weak storm. But, it could be like Wilma. Looking at the sat images this morning, Brian sent me this pic and he even said this looks like Wilma on satellite and may explode during the overnight.

Um yeah, um, we are going to need to go over the TPS reports and the lack of a cover sheet… The tornadoes today are in Kittson County MN.

Um yeah, were going to need to talk about where that is. Kittson County is 50 miles from, um yeah, Winnipeg Canada.

One can drive to Lawrence Kansas from Minneapolis faster then one can drive from Minneapolis MN to Kittson County MN. Kittson County is BFE on the boarder of Manitoba. It’s still May, and when I checked there was some sweet storms in western SD and even in NE.

Dang, if the storms don’t do something in the next hour, this bust is really going to burn a lot of people. Just not me, I’m on Sam Adams Lite #2 🙂

This morning, Eric called me up and asked if I was chasing today and my answer, “um no”. I really did not like the setup today based on the upper level heating or Cap. I did not feel like driving all the way to North Dakota when my gut told me, sit your ass at home and relax and get some work done.

At least Eric lives in Fargo so he only chased in his back yard. I saw on SwiftWX and Spotter Network that people were coming up as far away as Texas. That is just insane!!!

I also talked to Tony and he was up there too but he was chasing on someone else’s dime for a project so that makes the busts a little less painful when its just your time and not your money.

This goes out to everyone following the SPC forecasts and not doing their own forecasts, I’m sitting at home waiting for the weather to come to me tomorrow but for now, I’m going to have a Beer Chaser!!! BA HAHAHAHAHA

On a good note, I now have 60 of the almost 500 videos to start with for the new website all set and trans-coded with all the stuff. I’m just working on 3 computers at once today. One for email, one for trans-coding and one for cleaning up the final video catalog editing. Once the final video catalog editing is caught up, I’ll be trans-coding on two machines at once to speed things up.

I’m still around.  I have been focusing on work and helping out the SCV crews in the field for chasing instead of chasing myself this spring while I wait for the auroras. 

I was again treated to an amazing display of the Auroras or Northern Lights a few days ago and even was able to play around with a highly modified setup to do VR Aurora videos.

Here is the VR Video.

https://youtu.be/kcri0ppponw

I was also shooting video with my other camera to get some real time Auroras dancing around the sky.

And of course I was able to get some still photos but I do need to upgrade my old Canon to something more modern.

After spending most of the morning yesterday staking out the plane that turned into a non story so far… I ended up sleeping for most of the evening and into the morning so now I’m back on the normal sleep schedule for a few days. Lets just hope I can keep this up for at least a week.

Well the good news, I might be staying in town after all since a couple of things came together over the weekend. I don’t want to jinx it but its coming together finally.
On another note, since I got up early today, I’m back to working on the stock video collection and editing all the scrap video (stuff I said I would get back to…) while the other computer takes care of the online files. I found this video from 2003 that I totally forgot about and its of some lightning.

After looking at the lightning and slowing it way down, I noticed something. It has a step leader in the video. Here is the before and after frames and if you look at the before frame, it looks like a leader coming up from the ground.

Below the screen caps is the time-lapse footage. Since this is really close to the impact point, I don’t want to call this a ghost image since this is not way off and it only shows a little of the bolt, not the whole thing that goes off to the edge of the frame.

The Miami Heat is in town and rumor has it they are looking to take Kevin Garnett back to Miami from the Minnesota Timberwolves.

What did I say? Say it is not so… Yes, A good day scuba diving the shit out of a half ass day of storm chasing.
The storm threat was crap today and even worse, it went over to Wisconsin and Wisconsin sucks for storm chasing so, I went diving.

Dove Lac “of vis” Lavon (Lac Lavon Mine Pit) in Burnsville today and it was not that bad, 8-10 feet and the weeds were not in yet at the shore. The water level is down by at least 3 feet but the stocked fish made it worth it.

I had Sunny’s, Crappies, Northerns, Trout and Small Mouth Bass all swimming around me and checking out what was up. I was like having a huge fish take all to myself to play with the fish. For a local dive spot 10 minutes from home, it’s pretty sweet considering it takes me longer to get all my gear ready then it does to drive there. If I get this new gig out east, I’m going to be missing the diving and dive buddies a lot. But I also in talks again with some gigs in Florida and may end up moving there too. I do have the underwater video gig nailed down at the end of June with Brian. Were going to document the Ultimate Getaway and at first it was going to be a big were we were doing a short 3 day gig but now it has turned into a seven day underwater video shoot that now has the Florida Fish and Wildlife doing a survey of the reefs and we will be surveying them and the boat for a documentary about scuba diving.